Millennium Journal of International Studies 1996 Saurette 1 28

I Mistrust all Systematizers and Avoid
Them: Nietzsche, Arendt and the
Crisis of the Will to Order in

International Relations Theory
Paul Saurette
There are more idols in the world than there are realities: this is my evil
eye for this world, that is also my evil ear....For once to pose questions
here with a hammer and perhaps to receive for answer that famous hollow
sound...
Let us articulate this new demand: We need a critique of moral values, the
values of these values themselves must rs: be called in questionand for
that there is needed a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in
which they grew, under which they evolved and changed?
What would it mean to question the value of moral values? A collapse into
relativistic amoralism? Or worse, a rejection of the very notion of ethical action,
thus ensuring the rule of the strong over the weak? Or could this path explore
our normative foundation, so as to revitalise human interaction; to question
traditional and natural limits placed on normative theory, so as to expand the
RS. Northedge Essay, I996 - The Northedge Essay Competition was established in 1986
in memory ofone of the founders ofMi1lcnnium, Professor F.S. Northedge. In his many
years at the LSE, Professor Northedge was a source of encouragementand inspiration to
graduate and undersgraduate students alike. He helped to make Millennium a journal

open to the discussion of new issues in international relations, and open to the work of
young scholars as well as the more established academics and practitioners in the field.
Millennium would like to thank all those who submitted their work to the competition
this year. There were a number of exceptional entries, and we expect that many of them
will nd their way into print. If this competition encourages young authors to strive for
and reach the standards requiredfor publication. then it is surely serving a purpose of
which Professor Northedge would have approved. - The Editors.
I would like to thank Justin Rosenberg and Mark Hoffman for their evercl1aIlenging
discussions, Ken Reshaur and Paul Vogt for their extraordinary teaching in. Political
Theory. and the Millennium referees for their comments. In particular, I am grateful to
Marc Saurette for reading the first dra, and would especially like to thank Kathryn
Trevenen for her incredibly critical editorial prowess.
I. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. RJ, Hollingdale (London: Penguin
Books, 1990), Foreword, emphasis in original.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York,

NY: Vintage Books, I967), Preface, Section 6, emphasis in original.
(3 Millennium: Journal oflntemational Studies, 1996. ISSN 0305-3298. Vol. 25, No. l, pp. I-28
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possibilities of political action? Perhaps it is necessary to philosophise with a

hammer, so as to hear the hollow ring of those ancient idols and go beyond
them. For those standards which continue to masquerade as nature, while covertly
structuring the limits of our modern imagination, are among those least natural,
least benign, and perhaps, least appropriate to late modernity.
To articulate this demand in International Relations (IR) theory is to assert the
historicity of its normative framework and to suggest that to evaluate truly the
normative value of particular standards of political action, the constructed nature
of the foundational terms of debate must be exposed, and their utility

reconsidered.
opposition of
differences, it
philosophical
Speci cally, it is to recognise that while the conventional

Realism against Cosmopolitan Idealism highlights signicant
conceals the more important fact that both accept as natural the
foundation of the Will to Truth/Order. This unquestioned
philosophical substructure, however, is neither natural nor neutral terrain.
Rather, I would suggest that this foundation sets profound limits on the horizon
of normative theory by establishing as natural an intellectual framework which
severely circumscribes the very denition, and thus the normative potential, of
politics.
I therefore propose to use the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah
Arendt to examine the historical inuence of the Western philosophical
foundation of the Will to Order on traditional conceptions of the normative value

of politics within IR theory. For if Nietzsche explores the philosophical tradition
of the Will to Order as the foundation for the modern understanding of
morality, Arendt reveals the way in which it has resolutely dened our
conceptions of the possibilities of modern political action. My goal, however, is
not simply to trace the inuence of this philosophical foundation as an arcane
exercise of political theory, but to otfer, as would Nietzsche or Michel Foucault,
a history for the present? Once it becomes clear that our modern understanding
of political action, be it intemational or domestic, evolved from and depends
upon the philosophical foundation of the Will to Order/Truth, it also becomes
apparent that both these models are increasingly untenable in late modernity, and
that it is imperative to contemplate a renewed model of politics and philosophy.
If I have turned to Arendt and Nietzsche to help clarify the challenge that
normative IR theory currently faces, it is because they, perhaps more than many
3. This is Michel Foucaulfs term; see The Eye of Power: Power and Strategies;
Truth and Power; and Two Lectures, in Colin Gordon (ed), Power/Knowledge (New
York, NY: Random House, 1980). It clearly derives, however, from Nietzschcs early
notion of critical history and his later genealogical method by which he historicises the
natural past in order to problcmatise the present and expand the possibilities of the
future. On the former, see Nietzsche, On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,
in Unfashionable 0bservan'ons,trans. R. Gray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
I995). On the latter, sec Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 2. For one of Foucaults more explicit
acknowledgments of his debt to Nietzsche, see Nietzsche, Genealogy and History, in
,-
. ,. ~. . i
..
Language. Comzrer-lwenmry. Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).
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#., ._V. ,. ,. .,-a.,
l Mistrust All Systernatizers

others, offer an attempt fundamentally to question and revitalise the promise of
the political in light of this philosophical crisis of modernity.
The Will to Order and Politics-as-Making
The Philosophical Foundation of the Will to Truth/Order

l mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. A will to a system is a lack of
integrity.4
According to Nietzsche, the philosophical foundation of a society is the set of

ideas which give meaning to the phenomenon of human existence within a given
cultural framework. As one manifestation of the Will to Power, this will to
meaning fundamentally influences the social and political organisation of a

particular community.5 Anything less than a profound historical interrogation of
the most basic philosophical foundations of our civilization, then, misconceives
the origins of values which we take to be intrinsic and natural. Nietzsche
suggests, therefore, that to understand the development of our modern conception

of society and politics, we must reconsider the crucial inuence of the Platonic
formulation of Socratic thought. Nietzsche claims that preSocratic Greecebased

its philosophical justification of life on heroic myths which honoured tragedy and
competition. Life was understood as a contest in which both the joyful and
ordered (Apollonian) and chaotic and suffering (Dion)/sian) aspects of life were
accepted and afnned as inescapable aspects of human existence. However, this
incarnation of the will to power as tragedy. weakened, and became unable to
sustain meaning in Greek life. Greek myths no longer instilled the self-respect
and self-control that had upheld the pre-Socratic social order. Everywhere the
instincts were in anarchy; everywhere people were but ve steps from excess: the
monsrrum in ammo was a universal danger? No longer willing. to accept the
tragic hardness and self-mastery of preSocratic myth, Greek thought yielded to
decadence, a search for a new social foundation which would soften the tragedy
of life, while still giving meaning to existence. In this-context, Socrates thought
became paramount. in the words of Nietzsche, Socrates
saw behind his aristocratic Athenians; he grasped that his case, the
idiosyncrasy of his case, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of
degeneration was everywhere silently preparing itself: the old Athens was
4, Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 1, Maxims and Arrows, Section 26.
5. Nietzsche thus understands philosophy as a historical, but fundamental, need to explain

and understand existence.
6. Nietzsche suggests that the Apollonian and Dionysian are fundamental and
irrepressible aspects of life, and that all philosophical understandings of existence have
sought to explain and balance their relationship with human existence.
7. Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 1. Problem of Socrates, Section 9.
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Millennium
coming to an endAnd Socrates understood that the world had need of him
his expedient, his cure and his personal art of self-preservation.
Socrates realised that his search for an ultimate and eternal intellectual standard
paralleled the widespread yearning for assurance and stability within society. His
expedient, his cure? An alternative will to power. An alternate foundation that

promised mastery and control, not through acceptance of the tragic life, but
through the disavowal of the instinctual, the contingent, and the problematic. In
response to the failing power of its foundational myths, Greece tried to renounce
the very experience that had given rise to tragedy by retreating/escaping into the
Apollonian world promised by Socratic reason. in Nietzsches words,
[r]ationality was divined as a savt'our...it was their last expedient. The
fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at rationality
betrays a state of emergency: one was in peril, one had only one choice: either
to perish, or be absurdly rarional...." Thus, Socrates codied the wider fear of
instability into an intellectual framework.
The Socratic Will to Truth is characterised by the attempt to understand and

order life rationally by renouncing the Dionysian elements of existence and
privileging an idealised Apollonian order. As life is inescapably comprised of
both order and disorder, however, the promise of control through Socratic reason
is only possible by creating a Real World of eternal and meaningful forms, in
opposition to an Apparent World of transitory physical existence. Suffering and
contingency is contained within the Apparent World, disparaged, devalued, and
ignored in relation to the ideal order of the Real World. Essential to the Socratic
Will to Truth, then, is the fundamental contradiction between the experience of
Dionysian suffering in the Apparent World and the idealised order of the Real
World. According to Nietzsche, this dichotomised model led to the emergence

of a uniquely modern understanding of life which could only view suffering
as the result of the imperfection of the Apparent World. This outlook created a
. . _., . t
modern notion of responsibility in which the Dionysian elements of life could be

understood only as a phenomenon for which someone, or something, is to blame.
Nietzsche terms this philosophically-induced condition ressentiment, and argues
that it signalled a potential crisis of the Will to Truth by exposing the central
contradiction of the Socratic resolution.

This contradiction, however, was resolved historically through the aggressive
universalisation of the Socratic idea! by Christianity. According to Nietzsche,
ascetic Christianity exacerbated the Socratic dichotomisation by employing the
8. Ibid., emphasis in original.
9. Ibid, Problem of Socrates, Section 10, emphasis in original.

10. Nietzsche understands modernity in two ways. First, he suggests that modemity has
been characterised by the development of the Will to Truth, in which case modemity is
a series of philosophical resolutions beginning with Socrates. Nietzsche also uses
modernity, however, in the sense of we modems who are witness to the crisis of the
Will to Truth and the Death of God. For clarity, 1 will refer to his first meaning as
modernity, and to the crisis of the Will to Truth as late modernity.
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.
I Mistrust All Systematizers
Apparent World as the responsible agent against which the ressentiment of life
could be turned. Blame for suffering fell on individuals within the Apparent
World, precisely because they did not live up to God, the Truth, and the Real
World. As Nietzsche wrote,
I suffer: someone must be to blame for it thinks every sickly sheep. But
his shepherd, the ascetic priest tells him: Quite so my sheep! someone must
be to blame for it: but you yourself are this someone, you alone are to
blame for yourself,you alone are to blame for yourseIfThis is brazen

and false enough: but one thing is achieved by it, the direction of
resseritiment is altered."
Faced with the collapse of the Socratic resolution and the prospect of
meaninglessness, once again, one was in peril, one had only one choice: either
to perish, or be absurdly rational...." The genius of the ascetic ideal was that
.it preserved the meaning of the Socratic Will to Power as Will to Truth by
extrapolating ad absurdittm the Socratic division through the redirection of
resserztiment against the Apparent World! Through this redirection, the Real
World was transformed from _a transcendental world of philosophical escape into
a model towards which the Apparent World activeiy aspired, always blaming its
contradictory experiences on its own imperfect knowledge and action.
This subtle transformation ofthe relationship between the dichotomised worlds
creates the Will to Order asthe dening characteristic of the modern Will to
Truth. Unable to accept the Dionysian suffering inherent in the Apparent World,
the. ascetic ressenIt'mem_ desperately searches for the hypnotic sense of
nothingness, the repose of deepest sleep, in short absence of suertng.913
According to the ascetic model, however, this escape is possible only when the
Apparent World perfectly duplicates the Real World. The Will to Order, then,
isthe aggressive need increasingly to order the Apparent World in line with the
precepts of the moral Truth of the Real World. The ressentimem of the Will to
Order, therefore, generates two interrelated reactions. First, ressentiment
engenders a need actively to mould the Apparent World in accordance with the
dictates of the ideal, Apollonian Real World. In order to achieve this, however,
the ascetic ideal also asserts that a truer, more complete knowledge of the Real
World must be established, creating an ever-increasing Will to Truth. This selfperpetuating movement creates an interpretative structure within which
everything must be understood and ordered in relation to the ascetic Truth of the
Real World. As Nietzsche suggests,
x
'
'[t]he ascetic ideal has a goal~this goal is so universal that all other interests
of human existence seem, when compared with it, petty and narrow; it
Il. Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 2, Part III, Section IS, emphasis in original.
I2. Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 1, Problem of Socrates, Section 10, emphasis in original.
I3. Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 2, Part III, Section 17.
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Millennium
interprets epochs, nations, and men inexorably with a view to this one goal;
it permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, afrrns

and sanctions solely from the point of view of its interpretation.
The very structure of the Will to Truth ensures that theoretical investigation must
be increasingly ordered, comprehensive, more True, and closer to the perfection
of the ideal. At the same time, this understanding of intellectual theory ensures
that it creates practices which attempt to impose increasing order in the Apparent
World. With this critical transformation, the Will to Order becomes the
fundamental philosophical principle of modernity.

The Human Condition and Political Action
While Nietzsche traces the historical inuence of the dominant philosophical

foundations of the Will to Truth/Order, Arendts thought can be interpreted as
a sustained examination of the consequences of this tradition for our notions of
political action. Like Nietzsche, Arendt traces the origin of the modern
understanding of politics to the interpretative framework inaugurated by Socrates '
and Plato. Therefore, in order to understand Arendts conception and critique of
the traditional Western definition of politics, it is necessary to examine several

of the classical distinctions through which she explores the nature and role of
politics. In The Human Condition, Arendt characterises human activity and
political life (the vita activa) as being composed of three distinct types of
'
activity. The rst of these, labour, is activity which directly responds to. the need
for biological survival. As such, Arendt states that the human condition of
labour is life itself .'5 Labour is the automatic cycle of production and
consumption which ends only with death and is therefore universal to all
humanity.
In contradistinction to labour, Arendt suggests that the activity of work
involves the production of the human artice and the durable material world
where humans live. The primary characteristic of work is that it is the realm
of violence in which force is used to manipulate natural material. It is a process
of fabrication guided from start to finish by an idea or model, whose goal is

simply the realisation of this form in the human physical world of appearance.
The worker is the master of the entire process and conceives of a denite
beginning and end through which the ideal is realised. As opposed to labour,
then, work is the realm of mastery and control. Moreover, by erecting a durable,
objective, and relatively stable world of human artifacts, homo faber rescues
animal labarans from the endless flow of biological life and transcends his own
subjectivity by constructing a durable world of his own which stands apart from
'
14. Ibid.., Section 23, emphasis in original.
13'. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1954), p. 9.
l6. rm, p. 8.
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both the maker and the natural world. Through homo faber, humanity both
afrms and escapes the inexorable cycle of birth and death by fabricating a realm
of objects in which the communal reication of memory is possible. Work is
therefore a critical human activity which allows action to give human existence
a sense of immortality, of endurance in time, deathless life on this earth, and
of meaning beyond simple survival.
Despite the necessity of both labour and work, action is the most uniquely
human activity because only through action can humanity realise the fundamental
universality and individuality of human existence. According to Arendt, action
is the activity that allows humanity to comprehend and reproduce the existential
and irreducible human condition of plurality and natality. As Arendt suggests,
the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only
because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that
is, of acting. in this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of
natality, is inherent is all human activities.' This inherent individuality creates

human plurality as the condition of human action because we are all the same,
that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who
ever lived, lives or will live.2
While action is only possible because of the human condition of plurality and
natality, action also reproduces it. In other words, only action can realise the
potential plurality and natatity of the human world. As James Knauer suggests,
plurality is a potential given by the fact of natality, the birth of new human
individuals, but it can be realized only through political association. It is in

their acting and speaking together that unique individualsiemerge out of the
sameness and eternal recurrence of the species. And it is only when living
together as acting beings in political association that human beings encounter
other human beings, that plurality is realised.
According to Arendt, then, the purpose of a public sphere is to create the

condition of unmediated human interaction as the realisation of the human
condition through political action.
Arendt thus forwards a radically different conception of the political than is
commonly assumed in Western political theory. For Arenclt, authentic political
action is neither about the legitimate use of violence (Weber), nor the allocation
I7. J. Knauer, Motive and Goal in Hannah Arendts Concept of Political Action,
American Political Science Review (Vol. 74, N0. 4, i980), p. 722.
I8. Arendt, op. cit, in note I5, p.l8.
l9. Arendt, op. ciz., in note I5, p. 9. Her notion of natality extends into a penetrating
critique of the determinism ofhistoricism and stmcturalism, based on the importance of
the exceptional nature of human intervention into automatic, historical trends. See Hannah
Arendt, The Concept of History: Ancient and Modem, in Arendt, Between Past and
Future (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1977).
20. Arendt, op. cit, in note I5, p. 8.
2|. Knauer, op. ct't., in note [7, p. 722.
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of material wealth and power (Marx), nor merely the protection of the private
realm (liberalism). Rather, political action is conceived as a process through

which humans interact, and in so doing, reconcile the paradoxical individuality
and universality of existence. The uniquely public aspect of political interaction

is central to this process. Action requires the presence of others, because
individualisation is possible only through distinction from the universality of
humanity. This, in turn, is possible only by distinguishing oneself from other
individuals. Only the public realm, the realm of common appearance, provides
the unmediatecl human interaction in which the unpredictable nature of action
fulls the potential of, and reproduces, the human condition of plurality and
natality. It is this poetically unique character of human action that Arendt nds
essential:
[i]n man, otherness, which he shares with everything that is, and distinctness,
which he shares with everything alive, becomes uniqueness, and human
plurality is the paradoxical plurality of unique beings....Speech and action
reveal this unique distinctness. Through them, men distinguish themselves
instead of being merely distinct; they are the modes in which human beings
appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects but qua men. This
appearance, as distinguished from mere bodily existence, rests on initiative,

but it is an initiative from which no human being can refrain and still be
human. This is true of no other activity in the vita activa.
This process of individualisation paradoxically strengthens the notion of
community. The fact that individualisation is possible only within a common
public sphere underlines the importance of a political community. As each action

inserts an individual into the pre-existing web of human relations, it creates
reactions and new actions from others. Through this association, a common
world of appearances is created in which the variety of perspectives converge to
form a reality that gives meaning to society. It is precisely the exchange of a
plurality of perspectives that shapes a common political reality, and thus
ensures the possibility of action in concert. As such, it is not through the
imposition of community over individuality, or" identity over difference that
Arendt sees interaction and association possible. Instead, Arendt recognises the
importance and value of community through difference and plurality. As Leah
Bradshaw comments, the central thesis of The Human Condition can be

summarized as follows: action and speech are the supreme expressions of
civilisation for they reveal plurality and freedom as constitutive elements of a

distinctly human existence.
22. Arendt, op. cit, in note 15, p. 188.
23. lbid., p. 176.
24. Leah Bradshaw, Acting and Thinking (Toronto: University Press, I989), p. 3.
. _,. .
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Modern Politics-As-Making
Arendts conception of political action seems unorthodox to modern ears
precisely because it has been systematically marginalised within the tradition of

Western political theory. Arendt suggests that the denial of politics as action is
a recurrent condition. She notes that
[e]xasperation with the threefold frustration of actionthe unpredictability
of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process and the anonymity of its
authorswis almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great
temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to nd a
substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape
the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of
agents.
This exasperation almost invariably led to attempts to abolish the plurality of the
public realm by replacing human interaction with the absolute control of
rulership. This conversion, however, fundamentally transforms the understanding
of politics by replacing the notion that to be human is to exist within a plurality

and act freely, with the idea that men can lawfully and politically live together
only when some are entitled to command and others forced to obey.2
Arendt contends that this rule-based conception of political action assumed a
hegemonic and natural status only when the philosophical transformation of
Western civilisation created an intellectual framework which necessitated
interpreting politics as rulership. From this perspective, the importance of
Arendts thought is that she reveals the way in which the Will to Order/Truth has
created the parameters of the modern understanding of politics. According to
Arendt, our modern notion of politics is an inevitable consequence of the
Platonic Will to Truth/Order. After Platos Republic, politics could no longer be
conceived of as the freedom to act with equals, but could be conceptualised only
as the ordering of society according to the world of forms. With this

paradigmatic substitution of making for acting, homo faber becomes the model
political actor, and the realm of human affairs can be interpreted only in terms
of work. Further, through this transformation, the concepts of mastery, control,
and violence are inextricably imposed onto the realm of politics. As Arendt
notes, [i]n the Republic, the philosopherking applies the ideas as the craftsman
applies his rules and standard; he "makes" his City as the sculptor makes a
statue; and in the nal Platonic work these same ideas have even become laws
which need only be executed? The politician is idealised as the craftsman
whose skill lies first in perceiving the ideal form of the product-tobe, and
second, in organising the means to execute its production.
25. Arendt, op. ca'1., in note 15, p. 220.

26. Ibid. p. 222.
27. Ib:'a.._ p. 227.
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This transformation inverts both the practice and the meaning of politics on at
least two levels. First, the end of political action becomes measured in terms
of the ability of actors to replicate an ideal form. As Arendt notes, this

instrumentalised model of politics evaluates action solely on the grounds of a
means-ends calculus which risks devolving into an eternal regression of

ungroundable utility. Arendt states that [t]he trouble with the utility standard
inherent in the very activity of fabrication is that the relationship between means
and end on which it relies is very much like a chain whose every end can serve
again as a means in some other context. The only possible way to stabilise
this chain is to posit an eternal and perfect end, such as justice, order, or God,
which acts as an unquestioned goal due to its perfect truthfulness. The essence
of the Platonic, and later Christian and Enlightenment, conceptions of political
action, then, is the ability to ground the nal end through recourse to an
unquestionable truth. By resituating political judgement in the realm of ideals,
this model denies that meaning derives from the apparent world of human affairs,
and replaces debate, action, and plurality with absolutes and ideals.
The dichotomisation of the ideal and apparent worlds results in a second

inversion. The notion of politician as craftsman undermines the possibility of
action in the political sphere by attempting to deny the very condition of

plurality and natality. The prerequisite qualities of equality and persuasion are
replaced by the precepts of fabrication: mastery and violence. Plural political
action is renounced in favour of the unquestioned order of rulership and mastery

(which destroys the potential for natality and plurality), or by the coercion of
violence (which simply overwhelms any possibility of action through sheer
strength). This consequence is then circularlyjustied by the belief that the end
of action can be nothing more than the realisation of the Real World in the
Apparent World. The conception of community through equality and difference
is inexorably replaced by the understanding of political community constructed
through mastery, control, and rule.
The dual inversion of politicsas-making explicitly reveals the profound impact

of the philosophical foundation of the Will to Order/Truth on the modern
conception of politics. Within this philosophical order, politics must be

understood as a process of fabrication in which the end utopian goal justifies and
underpins rulership, control, and domination.
From this perspective, the
development of a variety of Real World ideals (Platonic justice, Christian

salvation, or vulgar Marxist utopianism) which guide political action have
disguised the entrenched consistency of the understanding of politics-as-making.

It is precisely this denition of politics that must be exposed and
problematised. For politics-as-making is neither a natural nor realistic
conception of politics, but rather a historical consequence of a specific

philosophical foundation. As such, it is neither factual nor beyond critique.
~.--
2s. rm, p. :54.
--~-we
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in-'m. -=~:. - .- iV

The Will to Order of IR Theory: International PoIiticsas-Making
International Politics-as-Making
There are few academic traditions that accept politics-as-making less criticaily
than the discipline of IR. Even many critical scholars who problematise the
abjectly aggressive spirit of modern universalism still accept the dichototnised
world in which political action is meaningful only when (sometimes ironic)
utopias guarantee political action. I would suggest, in fact, that the

understanding of politics-as-making underpins virtually all traditional [R theory,
and in doing so, seriously limits the normative aspirations of IR theory. In
particular, I believe that the two central tendencies of politics-as-making have
determined the normative limits for political action in IR theory: that is (I) the
imposition of a Real vs. Apparent World dichotomy with an ideal Truth as

guarantor, and (2) the consequent need to understand politics as hierarchical rule.
Thus, by questioning the philosophical roots of normative theory, I am
attempting to historicise and destabilise the unquestioned value of the Will to
Order and its understanding of politicsas-making w_ithin IR theory.
In one sense, this approach parallels some of the pioneering work of R.B..I.
Walker and Richard Ashley. That their work is incredibly dense and resists
summary is almost already a truism. Despite the difficulty of their work,
29. This understanding ofpolitics seems to remain a prominent and largely unquestioned
foundation, although in different ways, for the Critical International Theories of Mark
Hoffman and Andrew Linklater. See especially Mark Hoffman, Agency, Identity and
Intervention, in [an Forbes and Mark Hoffman (eds), Political Theory, International
Relations and the Ethics of lntervemiorz (London: St. Martins Press, 1993), p. 198;
Andrew Linklater, Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations, Second
Edition (London: Harvester, 1990); Andrew Linklater, The Problem of Community in
International Relations, Alternatives (Vol. I5, No. I, 1990), pp. I35-I53; and Andrew
Linklater, Dialogue, Dialectic and Emancipation in International Relations at the End of
the PostWar Age, .Millennz'um.' Journal ofhzzernational Studies (Vol. 23, No. I, I994),
pp. I I9-I3]. Even Hoffman, who clearly recognises the epistemological and ontological
difficulties with the discourse ofuniversality, still relies on a modelof action that requires
an ironic utopia. Without a sustained examination of the ramications of using irony
to ground political action, however, this attempt risks merely strengthening the
dichotomised model of poIiticsas-making by using irony as a renewed utopian ideal
within late modernity. As such, although Critical International Theory represents a
signicant critique of traditional IR theory, I will not explore it here as an alternative

because it fails to problematise the understanding of politics-as-making.
30. This o-cited claim remains relevant, however, not only because it recognises
Walkers and Ashlcys theoretical distaste for representation, but also because it does
some justice to the multiple readings and strategies that they embed in their texts. Thus,
the thumbnail sketch which follows pretends neither to be an authoritative summary of
their work, nor even a summary of the essence oftheir work. Nor should it be taken to
suggestthat Ashley and Walker espousethe same position. Rather, my intention is simply
to establish that following from their insightful critiques ofsovereignty, both Ashley and
Walker largely focus on the dichotomy between international and domestic politics, and
in doing so, fail to engage in an explicit discussion of the underpinning philosophical
conception of politicsas-making in which international and domestic politics are dened
as identical.
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however, it is clear that both (though in different ways) take seriously Walkers
claim that IR theory constitutes an historically bound expression of the limits
of the contemporary political imagination...in which attempts to think otherwise
about political possibilities are constrained by categories and assumptions that
contemporary political analysis is encouraged to take for granted." Ashleys
deconstruction suggests that the Western tradition of binary opposition creates a

theoretical distinction between international relations and domestic politics which
serves to underpin the ideal of absolute rationality and sovereignty. As Donna

Gregory suggests,
Ashleys deconstruction, then, reveals that in Waltzs paradigm, Western

mans rationality achieves its sovereign status by positing an ultimate
chaosa what we are notas its opposite. The dlfferens of reason in the
discourse of IR is war. Mans rationality needs chaos in order to be
sovereign....The fact of our sovereign rationality, then, is relative, and
chaos is its necessitation partner.
Walker examines the limits of IR theory from a slightly different perspective,

problematising the temporal and spatial resolution of political community within
the concept of state sovereignty. In doing so, one of his central themes is that the
idea of sovereignty has functioned to distinguish international relations from
domestic politics. As Walker suggests,
the claim to universality within states becomes the ground against which a
tradition of international relations theory may be constructed through a
discourse of negation. Against order, anarchy; against peace, war; against
justice and legitimate authority; mere power and rules and accommodation;
against progress and emancipation, mere contingency and eternal return.
In this sense, Walker and Ashley seem to suggest that it is the opposition of the
domestic and the international that has served to constrain the normative options
available to IR theory. As such, they can be understood as historicising and
problematising the conceptual and normative foundations of IR theory.
31. R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside. International Relations as Political Theory

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I993), p. 5. See also Chapter 3.
32. See Richard Ashley Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading ofthe Anarchy
Problematique, Millennium (Vol. 17, No. 2, 1988), p. 227-262; Living on Border Lines:
Man, Poststructuralism, and War, in James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro (eds),
Intemational/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (New York,
NY: Lexington, 1989); and The Power of Anarchy: Theory, Sovereignty and the
Domestication of Global Life. in James Der Dorian (ed.), International Theory: Critical
Investigations (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 94428.
33. D. Gregory, Foreword, in Der Derian and Shapiro (eds), op. cit, in note 32, p.
xvii.
34. Walker, op. cit, in note 31, p. 152.
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My difficulty with this approach is that, by concentrating on the concept of
sovereignty, Walker and Ashley do not explicitly consider the possibility that the
normative alternatives of IR theory have been circumscribed even more broadly
by a more established historical denition of politics. Or rather, they do consider

that the traditional denition of politics has severely restricted the nonnative
vision of IR theory, but they tend to View its dening characteristic as the need
to oppose the international against the domestic. From one perspective, war and
the international sphere certainly differentiate and privilege the domestic realm,
as Walker and Ashley claim. I would argue, however, that this has been possible
only because there has existed another previous and unquestioned idealisation of
all politics, be it domestic or international, as politicsas-making. It is thus the
identity of both international and domestic politics-as-making, rather than merely
their dichotomisation, that has most profoundly limited the normative aspirations
and interpretations of classical IR theory.
While it has been conventional to posit the claims of realism and idealism as
the polar opposites of IR theory, I would argue that the interpretation of politicsas-making acts as the unacknowledged ground of the entire traditional debate.
On the one hand, realism stresses an understanding of politics as hierarchical rule

and bases its entire normative framework on a tautological and circular use of
this concept. Its normative claims, however, ultimately rest upon the assumption
of a dichotomised world in which the authority of tradition (understood as human

nature) acts as an unquestioned Truth justifying a conception of the state.
Cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, focuses on renewing the dichotomised
world through Reason-, and in doing so, regrounds the understanding of politics
as mastery and fabrication in which an ideal utopia becomes the Truth which
must be created on earth. While the two traditions embody slightly differing
approaches to politics, the definition of politics-as-making remains intact and
restricts both visions of the possibilities of political action.
.
Realism
The notion that Realism is a highly normative perspective is no longer a
contentious statement in contemporary IR theory. Although Morgenthau
35. I examine the traditional debate using the heuristic generalisations of realism and
cosmopolitan idealism for several reasons. First, I think this split does justice to the
historical roots and meaning of the debate, as it has been understood by the participants
themselves. Second, by using them, I am attempting to demonstrate that the entire
spectrum oftraditional debate in IR theory is normatively grounded (including even those
realists who deny it). More importantly, if the two traditional extremes can be shown to
rest on the same foundation, then those positions (e.g., variants of English Realism,
lntemational Society, or Communitarianism) which fall between the poles, but which I
do not have room to discuss, are also susceptible to iis critique.
36. This, perhaps, has been the central thrust of the critical turn over the last decade.
The general tenets of realism are well known, but it is important to recognise that
Realism is not a monolithic tradition. There are, of course, signicant differences and
inconsistencies within and between Realist theorists. In the context of this discussion,
however, it is its uniformity in understanding politics-as-making that is important.

Therefore, I presume a signicant degree of familiarity with the theoretical tendencies of
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Millennium
postulates the existence of objective laws of politics, this is only possible

through a series of normative manoeuvres which take the state as the ultimate
realisation of political interaction. By accepting that human nature is
characterised by a lust for power which creates danger for individual (and later
state) survival, Morgenthau follows an essentially Hobbesian conception of the
justification of domestic politics. The establishment of civil society through
the rule of law and centralised state power is viewed as a necessary result of
human nature. As such, Morgenthau accepts the state as a selfevident goal,
because only its hierarchical rule can tame natural conflict and ensure survival
and security. This normative bias is also betrayed in the work of Kenneth Waltz,
his strenuous claim to objectivity notwithstanding. In fact, Waltz's claim to
objectivity is conspicuous for the fact that it implicitly privileges the status quo
(the state) by default. Waltzs theory of anarchy, however, also seems to suggest
a more assertive moral framework. lnsofar as he views anarchy as a uniform
consequence of the existence of autonomous units, it seems clear that Waltz
merely adopts his own reading of Rousseaus state of nature to justify the
normative primacy of the state. In other words, Waltz justies the moral
legitimacy of the state simply by assuming that it is the only effective form of
civil society that can mitigate the logic of anarchy by ensuring hierarchical
control. Waltz thus replaces Morgenthaus embarrassing assumptions about power
with the sanitised notion of structural selfinterest, while continuing to justify the
state in terms of hierarchical security.
in both cases, the domestic order is privileged because progress and
perfection, or at least the mitigation of the state of nature, is assumed to be
possible only through control and rule. This conception appears coherent only
because non-order, understood as the lack of hierarchical rule, is a prion dened
as a state of nature/conict. It is only by a perfectly circular tautology, then, that
realism manages to privilege the state. Once anarchy is dened as dangerous,
politics can be conceptualised only as a process of fabrication through which a
secure community is forged by rule and control. Moreover, once
securityfcommunity is understood in these terms, the logic can only circulate
back and reinforce the understanding of political action as mastery and control
over human affairs through the authority or violence of rulership. When
considering international relations, then, it is completely consistent for realism
to label the international as anarchic and thus dangerous because it is beyond
realism and only briefly use Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, and Thomas Hobbes to
underline my general examination of the realist tradition.
37. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, Second Edition (New York, NY: Alfred
Knopf, I960). p. 33. See also Jack Donnelly, Twentieth Century Realism, in Teny
Nardin and David R. Mapel (eds.), Traditions of Interriational Ethics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, l992).
38. This is evident both in his reading of Rousseau in Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and
War (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, I959}, Chapter 6, and in his analogical
reasoning in Kenneth Waltz, Theory ofInternational Politics (Cambridge, MA: Addison
Wesley, i979), in which all autonomous unitsbc they individuals, poker players, tribes,
gangs, or states~operate according to the same competitive logic.
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I Mistrust All Systematiaers

control. Yet, because realism has previously dened non-order as inherently
dangerous to survival, the drive for state security compels the attempt to impose
order on the international realm. In a sense, the international must seem both
political (a space in need of hierarchical control) and apolitical (a space beyond
hierarchical control). This dichotomy leads to the double strategy of realism as

(1) the attempt to impose order on the international through reasoned foreign
policy and power. while (2) retreating into the normative value of the state, and
its circular normative justification of domestic order and state survival. In this
light, it is absolutely paradoxical and yet completely consistent for Morgenthau
to decry the international as the realm of irrationality and-emergency, while

nostalgically yearning for objective scientific laws which would allow the
statesman to impose theoretical order on international politics, and thus lead to
the actual control and mastery of the international realm. As such, realism
manages to privilege the normative value of the domestic realm while
simultaneously idealising the domestication of the international through an
extension of control and order.

What is startling about this strategy is not so much its circular logic, nor even
its contradictory tendencies, but rather what they suggest about the direction,
origin, and function of realist assumptions. It has always been understood that
the theories of Hobbes and Rousseau, and thus Morgenthau and Waltz, flow
logically from their a prior! assumptions about human nature. But what if the
relationship is backwards in this understanding? What if their assumptions of

human nature ow logically rom their theories of political action? The
importance of Hobbes might not be that he theorised the emergence of a new
mode of political action after the demise of Christianity, but rather that he
preserved the traditional understanding of politics-as-making by endowing it with

a new absolute: human nature. From this perspective, Hobbes conserves the
traditional interpretation of political action by simply substituting the Truth of
eternal human nature for the declining ideal of God. In other words, Hobbes
thought takes as natural the instrumental nature of politics and merely creates a
new anchor for the meansend calculation. Thus, while Hobbes can be viewed
as innovative and indicative of the emergence of a modern resolution of spatial
politics, I would suggest that the continuity manifested in his understanding
of politics-asmaking is perhaps the more remarkable of the two tendencies. In

this sense, the normative foundation and limitations of realism lie not merely in
the Hobbesian assumption of human nature, but rather in the tradition of politicsasmaking which remains intact despite Hobbes revolutionary strategy.
39. This tension is especially apparent in his response to Martin Wight. See Hans
Morgenthau. The Intellectual and Political Functions ofTheory, in Der Dorian {ed,), op.
ci:., in note 32, pp. 36-52.
40. For an interesting, if largely discursive, exploration of the realist need to control and
order the international in strategic studies, see Bradley Klein, SlraiegicSzudies and World
Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994).
4]. Walker, op. cit., in note 3!, p. 62.
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Millennium
Cosmopolitan Idealism
The inuence of the tradition of politics-as-making is no less evident in
idealism. The term

cosmopolitan
Realisms so-called anti-thesis:
within the literature,
term
contested
and
cosmopolitanism is admittedly a vague
of appeals to
the
similarity
under
assimilating a variety of approaches
Wights
Martin
since
Kant
is
However,
universality, progress, and humanity.
cited
is
often
and
optimist,
paradigmatic revolutionary, Ian Clarks prototypical
it
is
perhaps
literature,
as the central theorist of cosmopolitanism in contemporary
appropriate to consider Kant as representative of the underlying foundation of

cosmopolitanismf Despite his largely onedimensional appropriation into the
IR cannon, Kant is a sophisticated theorist who recognises the considerable

difficulties of his propositions. Thus, while not offering as extreme a version of
cosmopolitanism as some others, Kant suggests a more nuanced cosmopolitan
understanding of international politics that makes it somewhat more difficult, but
also more interesting, to unearth the inuence of the tradition of politics-as-
making upon his thinking. For if the Hobbes of realism can be read as creating
a renewed foundationijustication for the state without questioning the traditional

categories of action that underpin the tradition of poiitics-asmaking, the Kant of
cosmopolitanism offers a similar pattern. Although often referred to as an
optimist, Kants denitional use of the concept of the state of nature is virtually
identical to earlier social contract theorists. Not surprisingly, Kant decries the
anarchy of the state of nature as an intolerable situation from which civil society
grows. Kants distinctiveness lies in the fact that, unlike Hobbes, he creates a
teleological understanding ofhuman progress in which the tension between mans
reason and his unreasonable environment determines that human development
does not end with the establishment of the sovereign state. Kant argues that
the creation of civil society is an important stage in humanitys historical
development because it secures, with minimum restriction, those conditions under
which an individual is free, equal, and independent. Yet, Kant nds this era
incomplete because interstate relations remain caught in the conictual state of
nature which threatens the stability of domestic civil society. Instead of retreating
into, and thereby reifying, the sovereign state, Kant argues that providence has
provided humanity with the impetus to extend the conditions of domestic order
globally. Indeed, Kants teleological understanding of the development of
reason suggests that men are compelled to reinforce this law by introducing a
42. Chris Brown, for instance, suggeststhat it encompasses at least Kantian, Marxist, and
Utilitarianist positions. See Chris Brown, International Relations Theory: New Normative
Approaches (London: Harvester, I992), Chapter 2. In Nardin and Mapel, op. cit, in note
37, on the other hand, at least seven oftheir twelve ethical traditions claim to embody a
cosmopolitan perspective which transcends national boundaries.
43. See Brown, op. cir., in note 42, p. 39, and A. Linklater, Men and Citizens in
International Relations Theory, Second Edition (London: Macmillan, I990).
44. Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History, in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kam's Political
Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970), p. 50.
45. Immanuel Kant, On the Common Saying, in Reiss (ed.), op. ciI., in note 44, p. 74.
46. Kant, op. cit, in note 44, pp. 47-49.
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system of united power, hence a cosmopolitan system of general political
security. Thus, in Perpetual Peace, Kant outlines his well known view that
a cosmopolitan confederation of states will emerge due to the growth of reason

(as the inuence of nature and providence) and the rational intervention of
philosophers.
Consequently, Kant has been understood as a rationalist whose theories of

political action are an outgrowth of his faith in reason and teleological nature.
I would suggest, however, that Kants use of teleology and rational faith is more
a symptom than a cause. Kants teleology functions primarily to reground the
Ideal/Real World dichotomy in an attempt to save the interpretation of politicalas-making. Where Hobbes resorts to human nature to replace the absolute Truth
of Christianity, Kant instead turns to reason and historical development to
guarantee a new ideal towards which all action should be oriented and judged.
While Kants writings harbour deep philosophical doubts about the
epistemological difficulties of knowledge, he still argues that through reason and
approximate knowledge, humanity can rationally recognise that the highest
purpose of nature, a universal cosmopolitan existence, will at last he realised as
the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may
develop. The foundational influence of the wiIlto-order is evident in the fact
that, despite Kants severe metaphysical doubts, he is still compelled to divide

the world into two spheres, one ideal, and one experiential, and argue that
although humanity can only approximate the world of ideals, we must still aspire
to this approximation. Rather than question the nature of politics and action,
Kant ignores the nascent -logic of his own scepticism and instead embraces a
rational faith to salvage a dichotomised world and to ensure guidance through
.
Truth.
This metaphysical escape inevitably denes his understanding of politics.
Kantian politics are merely rational projects which accelerate the coming of
this period of universal cosmopolitanism. Thus, although his oft-quoted motto

of the
enlightenment,
fSapere Aude:
Have courage to use your own
understanding? is indicative of his recognition of the crisis of religious and
traditional authority, the Kantian withdrawal into rational faith ensures that his
motto for cosmopolitan politics is more accurately summarised as something like
have courage to follow the philosophers truth, accessible neither through
47. Ibid., p. 49.

48. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Reiss (ed), op. cit, in note 44, p. 115.
49. Kent, op. cit., in note 44, p. 51, emphasis in original. Indeed, the role ofapproximate
knowledge in guiding human affairs is one of the most ambiguous elements of his
philosophical thought. However, due to space limitations, and the fact that virtually all
cosmopolitan IR scholarship on Kant has understood him as a rational progressivist, I can
only examine the practical consequences of his more dogmatic teleology.
50. Ibid., p. 46.
5|. lbz'd., p. 50.
52. Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment, in Reiss (ed.), op. cit., in note 44, p. 54.
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religion nor knowledge of human nature, but rather through historical reason.
Like Plato, Kant understands politics merely as the realisation of an ideal in our
world: a man of knowledge must master the human realm to create justice
(Plato) or freedom (Kant).
In this interpretative framework, Kant must
conceptualise cosmopolitan politics as an universalised system under which the
rule of domestic hierarchy is guaranteed by a law-govemed external
commonwealth? Domestic and international politics become identical: both

are conceived ideally as the rule of noumenal Truth and Reason through
imperfect, yet approximate, phenomenal laws. Thus, despite Kants philosophical

scepticism, his two key political beliefs(l) that peace and the individual
development of human potential can be guaranteed only by hierarchical political
rule, and (2)that the Apparent World must be an approximation of the Truth of
the Realreveal the foundational inuence of the Will to Order and p0litics-as-
making on cosmopolitanism.
The Crisis of Will to Order and Politics-as-Making

Traditional IR theory, then, is dened by an unquestioning acceptance of the
foundational model of politics-as-making. The difficulty with this situation is not
only that the consequences of this model have been questionable and should at
least be subject to discussion, but also that within late modernity, the very model
of politics-asmaking is untenable. For the understanding of politics-as-making
grew out of the Will to Order and its coherence continues to depend upon the
dichotomised metaphysics of this philosophical foundation. As Nietzsche

suggests, however, late modernity is characterised by nothing less than the
historical selfovercoming of the Will to Order/Truth and its notion of the

dichotomised world.
According to Nietzsche, the Christian need for increasingly ordered knowledge
and control gave rise to science. The initial project of Science was to discover
the natural laws by which the universe, and thus human behaviour, had been
ordered by God. The irony of the scientic Will to Truth, however, is that it
ultimately undermines the belief in God and the Real World of Christianity. The
scientic Will to Order soon discovered that it could neither prove the existence
of God, nor create the perfect Apollonian order of the Real World. This
realisation led to sciences severe scepticism, as its intensied Will to Truth
questioned the truthfulness of the dichotomised Christian ideal. As Nietzsche

wrote,
[t]he real worldunattainable? Unattained, at any rate. And if unattained

also unknown, Consequently also no consolation, no redemption, no duty:
53. See, for example, his statement that in order to establish the ideal of peace, politics
must be guided by philosophers, in Kant, op. cit, in note 48, p. lli.
54. Kant, op. cut, in note 44, p. 47.
.._.
..
.
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|,' ,. ._. ,_. . .

how could we have a duty towards something unknown?
(The grey of dawn. First yawnings of reason. Cockcrow of positivism)?
The very logic of the Will to Order, Christian morality itself, the concept of
truthfulness taken more and more strict|y,55 leads to the dawn of its selfovercoming. Science is
one of the latest phases of its [Will to Truth] evolution, one of its terminal
forms and inner consequencesmit is the aweinspiring catastrophe of two
thousand years of training in truthfulness that nally forbids itself the lie
involved in belief in God!
By challenging the truthfulness of God, the scientic Will to Truth undermines

the very dichotomy between the Real World and the Apparent World.
Science, however, is not an overcoming of the Will to Truth, but merely the
most complete, empty, and nihilistic ascetic ideal. It refutes faith but retains an
unquestioned belief in itself. Although science claims to follow no authority, its
unconditional will to truth is faith in the ascetic ideal itsel even if as an

unconscious imperative...lt is the faith in a metaphysical value, the absolute
value of truth. The scientic Will to Truth is both the most advanced and the
most dangerous manifestation of the Will to Order/Truth, because in spite of its

disavowal of the Christian dichotomised world, it retains a belief in Truth
without attaching any value or meaning to existence. With the rise of science,
then, the sole virtue of the Christian Will to Truth/Order, the faith in the dignity
and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being,
[becomes] a thing of the past. Man has become an animal, literally and without
reservation or qualification. The radical scepticism of science is the suicidal

nihilism of the latemodern age, affirming as little as it denies.' It is
the process by which all such transcendent grounds are dissolved in a
corrosive scepticism: the true world becomes a fable. The central value of
our culturegtruthadrives us towards ceaseless unrnasking....The irony, as
Tracy Strong observes, is that this discovery does not liberate us from the
sense that we must have truth in order to have meaning, that meaning is
somehow inextricably tied to truth or the universal. We continue to search
for what we know does not exist, conrming our growing sense
55. Nietzsche, op. C11,, in note I, How the "Real World" at last Became a Myth, Section
4, emphasis in original.
56. Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 2, Part II], Section 27.
57. Ibid., emphasis in original.
58. Ibid, Part ll}, Section 24, emphasis in original.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibr'd., Part III, Section 25.

61. loin. Part Ill, Section 26.
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Millennium
ofmeaninglessness; worse, we come to be at home in this exhaustion of
meaning.
Ironically, then, Nietzsche suggests that it is precisely the nihilism of scientic

faith which pushes man onto an inclined p1anenow he is slipping faster and
faster away from the centre intowwhat? into nothingness? into a penetrating
sense of nothingness."
The danger of the latemodern nihilistic Will to Truth is that this reactive will
to negation, while yearning for a truthful foundation, can only destroy and
negate. Even anthropocentric recreations of authoritative Truth, such as faith in

progress,
utilitarian
happiness-for-everyone,
socialist
utopias,
or
Kants
secularised teleologies, cannot survive the scrutiny of this nihilistic Will to Truth.
As Michael Haar notes,
[a]fter having killed Godi.e. after having recognized the nothingness of the
true worldand after having placed himself where God once was, Man
continues to be haunted by his iconoclastic act: he cannot venerate himself,
and soon ends up by turning his impiety against himself and smashing this
new idol.
The radical and untempered scepticism of scientific Will to Truth undermines the
foundational meanings of the modern world and thus threatens modern life with
the prospect of unconditional nihilism.
The Will to Truth must become conscious of itself as a problem if it is to
avoid this fate. And with the historical stage of late modernity, we are able
to explore the possibilities of this self-overcoming of the Will to Truth. As
Nietzsche states, [w]e nally come to a complete stop before a still more basic
question. We ask about the value of this will. Suppose we want Truth: why not
rather imrruth? and uncertainty? even ignorance?6 In this question, Nietzsche

at last sees the positive potential of the death of God. For while the danger of
nihilism is ever-present, Nietzsche suggests that the fact that a new problem
arises: that of the value of mi: "7 allows us to question the previously natural
belief that we must ground philosophical foundations in the notion of a

dichotomised world in which only ideal and true values can structure and guide
human interaction. Nietzsche forces the Will to Truth to draw its most striking
62. Dana Villa, Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche and the Aetheticization of
Political Action, Politico! Theory (Vol. 20, No. 2, i992), p. 286.
63. Nietzsche, op cit, in note 2, Part III, Section 25.

64. Michael Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysical Language, in D. Allison (ed.), The New
Nietzsche (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985}, p. 15.
65. Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 2, Part III, Section 27, emphasis in original.
66. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. trans. W. Kaufrnann (New York, NY:
Vintage Books, 1966), p. 1.
67. Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 2, Part III, Section 24.
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iriference, its inference against itse1f...[and] pose the question "what is the
meaning of all truth?""5 In doing so, he problematises the authority and the
value of a dichotomised model of action structured unquestioningly by a
conception of normative Truth. Nietz.sches paradoxical charge is thus to

overcome the Will to Truth and found a renewed philosophical will to power,
while simultaneously avoiding the abyss of modem nihilism. For us modems,
exposed without the reassurance of God or Truth, it is a rendezvous, it seems,
of questions and question marks.
Questions and Question Marks. The Will to Truth of 'AntiF0tmdationalz'sm

If the self-overcoming of the Will to Order has undermined the foundation from
which politicsas-making emerged, and on which it is dependent, then it is clear
that our normative understanding of political action must be profoundly
rearticulated. From this perspective, the central question before normative IR
theory in late modernity is to understand political action without the assurances
of Truth or Reason, while simultaneously avoiding the slide into decadent
nihilism and scientic meaninglessness. Some might suggest, however, that this
is exactly the project of many of the dissident scholars of IR. On the one hand,
I agree that such a postmodem ethic is necessary, possible, and emergent in
some of the critical literature. In fact, an inextricable component of much of this
scholarship is its self-consciously normative stance. Moreover, the frequent, if
rarely elaborated, calls for tolerance, difference, dialogue, otherness, thinking
space, radicalised democracy, eta, clearly delineate at least several ethical
agendas. From this perspective, the postmodern critique and reconstruction

within IR theory does seem to challenge both the faith in the dichotomised world
and the consequent understanding of politics as hierarchical rule which is

inherent in the Will to OrderfTruth.
The fundamental difficulty with the various positions in this approach, then,
is not the lack of ethical positions (as so many traditionalists still claim). Rather,
I would argue that it is the nature of the (non)debate around the normative
foundations of these positions that is highly problematic. Moreover, I would
suggest that this problem results largely from the fact that the debate between
postmodern and traditional IR theory has been cast along antifoundatio.nalist

versus foundationalist lines. These terms of debate have led to a situation in
which post-modern approaches have either rejected any discussion of the
philosophical foundations of their normative positions, or have justified their
68. Ibid., Part II], Section 27.

69. Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 66, p. I.
70. See for example the work of Richard Ashley. David Campbell, James Der Derian,
.lim George, Bradley Klein, R.B..l. Walker, and especially the special issue of
International Studies Quarterly (Vol. 34, No. 3, I990).
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Millennium
positions in terms of antifoundationaIism.7 Both of these responses are
inadequate, I believe, because they either fail to engage a topic that is

unavoidable in late modernity, or worse, because they misrepresent the crisis and
possibilities of late modernity and remain mired in the Will to Truth. Therefore,
my aim is to critique a certain strand of IR post-modernism which, I beiieve,
seriously limits the critical potential of post-modernism, to question the
foundationalist/anti-foundationalist terms that circumscribe the postmodern

debate, and, nally, to rekindle debate around the philosophical foundation of
politics by suggesting an alternative normative understanding of political action.
While many dissident scholars do not clearly explain the normative foundations
of their theoretical framework, the work of Jim George is often cited as an
extended defense and explanation of the post-modem IR theory ethic, Indeed,
a large part of Georges writings have been devoted to exploring the possibilities
of a new ethic of difference relevant to IR theory. In doing so, he offers one of
the clearest explorations of a postmodern ethic in IR theory. The logic of much
of his writing seems to develop as follows. Social science cannot fully capture,
understand, and represent the reality of life. Therefore, we can never know the
full and absolute Truth about anything. Since we cannot be sure of the truth of
anything, including the appropriateness of Western values, we need to adopt
a new Socratic spirit, combining a genuine humility before knowledge with
a critical attitude that accepts no givens, takes nothing for granted,
71. The characterisation of the traditional verstzs post-modern debate as one of

foundationalism versusanti-foundationalism has become endemic to IR theory. See Chris
Brown, "'TurtIes All the Way Down":Anti-Foundationalism, Critical Theory and
Intemational Relations, ii/lillennium (Vol. 23, No. 2), I994), pp. 2I3-239. The one
theorist whose work has explicitly avoided using these terms to describe both the debate
and his position within it is William Connolly. His chapter Global Political Discourse,
in William Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993),
speaks directly to the notion that the philosophical foundations of any approach need to
be engaged, and suggests moreover, that one cannot simply invert the hierarchies of
parameters founded by others. In my view, his remarks on the need for a constructive
general theory represent a recognition of the Nietzschean need for some sort of
foundationalism, arbitrary and open to critique though it may be: see ibrd., pp. 56-57.
It both is and is not surprising, then, that in the rigid and dichotomised debate between
foundationalism and anti-foundationalism. Connollys sophisticated analysis, which more
often focuses on degrees than extremes. is so rarely seriously engaged by critics mid
sympathisers of post-modemism alike.
72. _Iim George. Di'scourse.s-ofG/oba1' Polz'ic.s (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994). It
should be noted that I am not using Jim Georges position as representative of postmodern IR theory (even ifa single post-modern IR theory position could be said to exist).
Rather, if the overwhelming response has been silence, it no doubt conceals a variety of
positions which have not been made explicit. I have chosen to critique Georges work,
then. both because it is an explicit discussion of a possible normative justification of
postmodern IR theory, and because I feel that his position is especially dangerous,
succumbing precisely to the dangers oflate modernity that Nietzsche understood. Thus,
by critiquing his work, I am not dismissing post-modern IR theory. Rather, just the
opposite. By discussing Georges approach. I hope to encourage post-modern debate

towards a more sophisticated interrogation and extrapolation of its own foundation.
22
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er"-. -.~'~
l Mistrust All Systematizers

acknowledges
nothing
axiomatically,
questions
all
presuppositions,
challenges all arbitrarily imposed boundaries and always asks why.
This epistemologically derived ethic then becomes a normative foundation

claiming that it is in the act of not privileging that [poststructuralism] offers
emancipation and liberation.7
This strategy is problematic for several reasons. From a Nietzschean
perspective, George remains a noisy trumpeter of reality because despite the
ostensible rejection of Truth, his ethical logic still accepts the pre-eminence of
Truth as the only possible normative foundation. By stating that the
impossibility of Truth necessarily compels us to accept tolerance, humility, and
self-critique, he remains bound by the same logic as the Will to Truth. Even in
its negation of Truth. therefore, his critique merely inverts the hierarchy of the
Will to Truth and embodies the elegamiu syliogisiniz [t]here is no knowledge:
consequentlywthere is a God." In doing so, George fails to ask the question
why truth? and his argument remains little more than a radical extension of the
tradition ofthe scientic Will to Truth. Thus, Georges celebration of difference
is vulnerable to the charge of nihilism, not because he places too littie faith in
Truth, but rather because he still retains an unquestioning faith in the value of
Truth. Ironically, Georges characterisation of his celebration of difference as a
renewed (hyper?) socratic spirit is more appropriate than he intends.
From this perspective, @eorges writing reveals the essential problem with
discussing the postmodern debate in terms of anti-foundationalismi The
continuous, absolute, and critical (selconsciousness that George espouses is both

impossible and ultimately undesirable. There is, of course, no literally antifoundationalist position. Even -the notion of a suspicion of metanarratives is
itself a paradoxical metanarrative at most, and a normative foundation at the very
least. At its most extreme, Ge0rges hypersocratic spirit would result in a

completely transparent selfreflex_ivity that would be unable to justify any action,
decision, or judgement, and would be truly selfrefuting.- For as N-ietzsche
suggests,
73. Jim George. International Relations and the Search For Thinking Space,
1'n!ernazi'0nctI' Srzidies Quarterly (Vol. 33, N0. 3, I989), 13. 273.
74. .lim George and David Campbell, Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of
Ditfcrelice. /mernationui Studies Quarterly (Vol. 34, N0. 3. 1990), p. 28}.
75. Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 2, Part [11, Section 23.
76. Nietzsche, op. cit. in note 2, Part 111, Section 26.
77. While Brown, op. cz'r., in note 71, and others merely passively reproduce these terms
by summarising the debate along these lines, Georges work actively reinforces the rigidly
dichotomised parameters of this discussion by positively portraying the postmodern

position as one which does not privilege anything in contrast to intolerant
foundationalism oftraditional ethical discourse. See George, op. cit, in note 72, Chapter
7_.
78. It is precisely this ironic nature so evident in the work of Michel Foucault, .lean-
Francois Lyotard, and Nietzsche that is so often lacking after its appropriation into IR
theory.
23
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Millennium
[i]f we imagine the most extreme example, a human being who does not
possess the power to forget, who is damned to see becoming everywhere;
such a human being would no longer believe in his own being, would no
longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent
particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming; like the true
student of Heraclitus, in the end he would hardly even dare to lift a nger.
All action requires forgetting."
If there is no ultimate Truth on which to base action, pure self-reexivity would
reveal only that action is ultimately contingent. To act is necessarily to privilege,
if only because one option is chosen over another. And any truly Nietzschean
approach would recognise that the consequences of these actions, infused with
the inevitable power of human relations, always privilege, oppress, and create in
some manner.
I would therefore suggest that both foundationalism and anti-foundationalisrn
should be understood as relative, and not absolute, positions. From this position,
one cannot simply argue for or against one or the other, but perhaps one can
argue for more or less foundationalism or anti-foundationalism. On these terms,
a foundation is the inescapable (if arbitrary in terms of Truthfulness) set of
values and limitations that structure human interaction. A society, like
Nietzsches individual, requires a foundation so that it can temporarily forget the
ungroundable nature of judgement and affirm action and life in spite of the
throwness of being and arbitrariness of existence. As Nietzsche states,
[fjorgetting is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of
repression. To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to

remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle of our underworld of utility
organs working with and against one another; a little quietness, a little
tabula rasa of the subconsciousness, to make room for new things...that is
the purpose of active forgetfulness, which is like a doorkeeper, a preserver
of psychic order, repose and etiquette: it is immediately obvious how there
could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present
without forgetfulness. The man in whom this apparatus of repression is
damaged and ceases to function properly may be compared with the
dyspeptic-he cannot have done with anything."
Yet at the same time, society also requires the art of remembering, of critical
history. In Nietzsches words,
79. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Uses and Liability of History, in Unfashionabte

Observations, trans. R. Gray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, I995), p. 89.
80. This, above all else, is the message of Nietzschean and Foucauldian genealogies
which underline the historically constructed nature of all perspectives.
8]. Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 2, Part II, Section I.
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[tlhe very life that requires forgetfulness demands the temporary suspension
of this forgetfulness; this is when it is supposed to become absolutely clear
precisely how unjust the existence of certain things-for example, a

privilege, a caste or a dynastyreally is, and how much these things deserve
to be destroyed. This is when its past is viewed critically, when we take a
knife to its roots."
It is precisely this constant balancing between critique and foundation that is
necessaryand balancing is always a process of degrees, not absolutes. Thus, the
unconditional anti-foundationalism implicit in Georges renewed socratic ethic

is both as unrealistic and misguided as the traditional rationalist attempt to
unconditionally and eternally ground universality.
That Georges theoretically dened position is profoundly untenable is
nowhere more apparent than in the fact that he is unable to truly apply this
rationale when he discusses the parameters of a postmodem ethic. By

framing his discussion of post-modern ethics against the foil of realism, George
avoids even considering the possibility that some sort of foundation is inevitable
and necessary by dismissing any critique of anti-foundationalism as thoroughly
objectivist or Archimidean." In doing so, however, George fails to recognise
that his position may be open to critique from a non-objectivist positionas I
have tried to suggest in this artic1e-and thus needs to be more fully examined.
For the result of his unwillingness to consider his own anti-foundational
foundation is an ethic of difference which is startlingly familiar. The problem is

not so much that, as George notes, one does not have to be a post-modemist to
come to the kind of conclusions reached above, but rather that his respect for
difference teeters dangerously on the edge of identity. For an ethic of difference
which suggests that there are no "good" reasons why Others in the world should
not have the opportunities that I have had for a healthy environment, education,
a secure food supply, and the chance for participation in political decision-
making" risks universalising its own experience, without even the benet of
debate around its own foundation. In other words, while some, or perhaps even
all, of these things may be worthwhile and ethical, George cannot justify them
from the perspective of difference. Moreover, it is precisely at this level of
foundations, not at the level of epistemological principle, that we must discuss
the relevant degrees of identity and difference. For without the willingness to
question the underlying justification, one is left altogether too close to the
aggressive spirit of the Will to Truth, although this time. in the name of No
Truth.
82. Nietzsche, op. ci't., in note 79, 1). I06.

83. Jim George, Realist Ethics, lntemational Relations and Post-modemism: Thinking
Beyond the Egoism-Anarchy Debate, Mr'i'lenm'um (Vol 24, No. 2, 1995), pp. 195-223.
84. Ibid, p. 208
85. Ibid.,, p. 220.
86. lbid., p. 219.
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Millennium
The essential problem with Georges dyspeptic position is that it misconstrues
the nature of the debate by merely extending the belief that ethical questions can
be decided vis-61-vis the existence or non-existence of a normative Truth.
However, To Found or Not to Found is precisely not the question. To
historicise and problematise the denitional foundation of politics-as-making is
not to argue that we can dissolve limitations through absolute selfconsciousness,

but rather to suggest that we must reconsider what it means to be political after
the Death of God. The challenge is to discuss whether Truth as we know it can
ground a normative framework, or whether in late modernity, another model, one
which is sensitive to paradox and difference, to both the Apollonian and
Dionysian nature of life, is more appropriate. In response to this debate, Arendts
brilliance is that she offers a model of political action which paradoxically
promises to reinscribe meaning and a contingent foundation onto the world
without recourse to the Will to Truth.
Conclusion/Reconstruction? Arendtian Politics and Meaning
After the Death of God
TouristsThey climb mountains like animals, stupid and sweating; one has
forgotten to tell them that there are beautiful views on the way up.
Arendt radically questions the tradition of the Will to Order/Truth and politics-
asmaking by reconceptualising political action as a process which can create

meaning and justify a renewed ethic of community through difference. This
conception of political action as an end in itself allows her to challenge the
twin assumptions of politics-as-making while also responding to the crisis of

meaning after the Death of God. By locating the realisation of individuality and
community within political action, Arendt rejects the Real/Apparent World
dichotomy and questions the value of hierarchical rule. In doing so, Arendt
grounds two of the key normative claims of post-structuralism(l) a renewed
understanding of identity politics, and (2) the call for equality, difference, and
freedomwithout recourse to the Will to Truth/God, On one hand, she offers an
alternative understanding of the creation of identity. Rather than looking to God,
Reason, the Nation, or even Gender to give inflexible meaning and identity to
individuality, Arendt views political interaction as one manner of establishing the
relation between individuality and community, and identity and difference. In

opposition to the understanding of politics as the creation of ordered and
universalised identity, Arendts notion of political interaction posits a crucial
interdependence between individuality and the common public sphere in which
87. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, Section 202 included in
Seventy Five Aphorisms. in Genealogy ofMorals and Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann
[New York, NY: Vintage Books, i967}, p. [83, emphasis in original.
88. Hannah Arendt, On Violerzce (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970),
p. 52.
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F,. _._. , . _-.
l Mistrust All Systematizers

community through distinction and otherness is not merely possible, but
necessary. In fact, her conception of political action ensures the possibility of
fluid and mobile identity through creative and shifting action. As Lisa Disch
suggests, Arendt rejects the view that political communities must constitute
themselves on the basis of a shared and stable identity, because identity-based
foundings and maintenances, just like those based in the contestation of God,
Truth or natural law, threaten to close the spaces of politics, to homogenize or
repress the plurality and multiplicity that political action postulates.s Rather
than resolving the tension between individuality and community under the sign/
authority of absolute identity or difference (or attempting to dissolve all identity
through the myth of transparent self-consciousness), Arendt offers an
understanding of politics in which the end of politics is the very process by
which individuality and otherness, as well as universality, can be realised.
Arendts reconceptualisation of political action also critiques the second
fundamental characteristic of politics-as-making: the idea that hierarchical rule
is inherent to politics. Her understanding of political action as the realisation and
reproduction of the human condition of plurality and natality (and individuality
and community) ensures that equality (but not sameness) and freedom (but not
atomisation) must be central to political action. On the one hand, Arendt suggests
that equality is intrinsic to political action, because without equality in the public
realm, the realisation of individuality is established not through distinction, but
through domination. In this context, plurality and n_atality cannot be realised,
because individualisation becomes atomisation through autonomy, which destroys
any possibility of a simultaneous and comprehensive realisation of human
universality. Arendt therefore reconceptualises freedom not as the liberal utopia
of absolute liberation, sovereignty, and autonomy, but rather as the process of
free spontaneity and creation through communal political interaction. In this
Sense, Arendt profoundly reconsiders freedom and equality, and grounds them
not as ideal goals, but rather as constitutive elements of the process of political
interaction. In doing so, she manages to revitalise the foundation for equality and
freedom, while focussing on the importance of the participatory process, not the
ideal end, of political action.
This is not to suggest that Arendts work represents the next stage of IR
theory. Rather, Arendts importance is that she recognises both the necessity of
foundation and the fact that the self-overcoming of the Will to Truth/Order
undermines the traditional conception of foundationalism. By offering .a renewed
foundationthe importance of politics as a process through which to resolve the

existential experience of pluralitywithout grounding it in an untenable Will to
Order/Truth, Arendt forwards an important and appropriate reconsideration of the
political which underlines the historicity of politics-as-making, while also
89. Lisa Disch, Book Review of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics,
Political Theory (Vol. 22, No. l, 1994), p. 177.
90. For a discussion of her complex notion of freedom, see Hannah Arendt, What is
Freedom, in Arendt, op. cit, in note 19, pp. 143-72.
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Millennium
offering a renewed model of the possibility of politics. Fusing politics and
philosophy by recognising the politics of philosophy as well as the potentially

philosophical role of politics, Arendt fulls NietLsches call and affirms both the
Death of God and the end of politics-as-making while avoiding a decadent and
nihilistic will to nothingness. The question is not, therefore, whether Arendts

foundation is true and thus represents the only response to late modernity.
Rather, we must consider whether we could use this understanding to reground

and reconceptualise the normative possibilities of political action. For if Arendt
and Nietzsche stress anything, it is that the question of foundation no longer

relies on the threadbare and familiar chorus of Truth. Instead, it must be open
to the harmony and discord of political debate.
IR theory cannot ignore this historical context. Although the discipline has
long employed the claim to a discrete area of analysis as a bulwark against
unwanted metatheoretical criticism, this self-imposed monasticism is not
justifiable. IR theory can claim to profoundly contemplate norrnative questions
only if we reconsider and problematise the most basic assumptions and
philosophical foundations of [R theory. For it is clear that the Will to Order and
its characterisation of politics-as-making is neither a natural nor neutral origin.
To realise this is to assert the historical importance and inuence of any
underpinning philosophy and to recognise the contemporary need for a sustained
reconsideration of the possibilities, and limitations, of political action. If I have
turned to Arendt and Nietzsche as guides in this endeavour, it is because they
recognise that to live in late modernity,
to live in a political realm with neither authority nor the concomitant

awareness that the source of authority transcends power and those who are
in power, means to be confronted anew, without the religious trust in a
sacred beginning and without the protection of traditional and therefore self-
evident standards of behaviour, by the elementary problems of human living
together.
This, above all else, is the challenge and the potential of the Death of God.
Paul Sauretre will be commencing a PhD in Political Theory at Johns
Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, 21218 in September 1996
5.
v
1
5
2!.
!
91. Hannah Arendt, What is Authority, in Arendt, op. cir., in note 88, p. I41.
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I Mistrust all Systematizers and Avoid

Them: Nietzsche, Arendt and the

Crisis of the Will to Order in

which they grew, under which they evolved and changed?

graduate and undersgraduate students alike. He helped to make Millennium a journal

Trevenen for her incredibly critical editorial prowess.

Books, 1990), Foreword, emphasis in original.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York,

possibilities of political action? Perhaps it is necessary to philosophise with a

least benign, and perhaps, least appropriate to late modernity.

To articulate this demand in International Relations (IR) theory is to assert the

normative value of particular standards of political action, the constructed nature

of the foundational terms of debate must be exposed, and their utility

Speci cally, it is to recognise that while the conventional

philosophical substructure, however, is neither natural nor neutral terrain.

Arendt to examine the historical inuence of the Western philosophical

foundation of the Will to Order on traditional conceptions of the normative value

of political action, be it intemational or domestic, evolved from and depends

upon the philosophical foundation of the Will to Order/Truth, it also becomes

Language. Comzrer-lwenmry. Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977).

#., ._V. ,. ,. .,-a.,

l Mistrust All Systernatizers

the political in light of this philosophical crisis of modernity.

The Will to Order and Politics-as-Making

The Philosophical Foundation of the Will to Truth/Order

According to Nietzsche, the philosophical foundation of a society is the set of

cultural framework. As one manifestation of the Will to Power, this will to

meaning fundamentally influences the social and political organisation of a

suggests, therefore, that to understand the development of our modern conception

formulation of Socratic thought. Nietzsche claims that preSocratic Greecebased

idiosyncrasy of his case, was no longer exceptional. The same kind of

4, Nietzsche, op. cit, in note 1, Maxims and Arrows, Section 26.

5. Nietzsche thus understands philosophy as a historical, but fundamental, need to explain

his expedient, his cure and his personal art of self-preservation.

expedient, his cure? An alternative will to power. An alternate foundation that

Apollonian world promised by Socratic reason. in Nietzsches words,

[r]ationality was divined as a savt'our...it was their last expedient. The

instability into an intellectual framework.

The Socratic Will to Truth is characterised by the attempt to understand and

Will to Truth, then, is the fundamental contradiction between the experience of

World. According to Nietzsche, this dichotomised model led to the emergence

modern notion of responsibility in which the Dionysian elements of life could be

contradiction of the Socratic resolution.

8. Ibid., emphasis in original.

9. Ibid, Problem of Socrates, Section 10, emphasis in original.

,. -,. -._ . ,.t

I Mistrust All Systematizers

blame for yourself,you alone are to blame for yourseIfThis is brazen

extrapolating ad absurdittm the Socratic division through the redirection of

World was transformed from _a transcendental world of philosophical escape into

Order, therefore, generates two interrelated reactions. First, ressentiment

it permits no other interpretation, no other goal; it rejects, denies, afrrns

fundamental philosophical principle of modernity.

While Nietzsche traces the historical inuence of the dominant philosophical

a sustained examination of the consequences of this tradition for our notions of

understanding of politics to the interpretative framework inaugurated by Socrates '

and Plato. Therefore, in order to understand Arendts conception and critique of

the traditional Western definition of politics, it is necessary to examine several

In contradistinction to labour, Arendt suggests that the activity of work

of fabrication guided from start to finish by an idea or model, whose goal is

I Mistrust All Systematizers

a sense of immortality, of endurance in time, deathless life on this earth, and

of meaning beyond simple survival.

universality and individuality of human existence. According to Arendt, action